2. Texas Brisket

The state’s too big to contain just one kind of slow-cooked beef: East Texas usually chops brisket and serves it on a bun with thick and sweet tomato-based sauces, while Central Texas slices and serves it with bread and thinner vinegar-based sauces on the side.

3. Tex-Mex

While you’re in Texas, you might as well sample fajitas, chili, nachos, and the like where they were adapted to what you know, but made the way they were before getting shipped across state lines in another Chili’s.

A simple pairing that’s caused a lot of debate: mushroom gravy or sausage gravy? Complete breakfast or side dish? Eggs or potatoes? At the end of it all, though, so long as the biscuit’s fluffy on the inside, crisp on the outside, and downright delicious, it’ll be fine.

Having to say “fried” out loud just means you need to leave because that restaurant’s making it wrong. However, even if fried chicken wasn’t invented in the South, it sure was perfected there — which just leaves whether to top this with gravy or butter and syrup.

13. Po’ Boys

Nicknamed for the poor boy strikers who had nothing else to eat in N’awlins in the ’20s, it’s generally, meat, sauce, lettuce, and tomatoes on a foot-long piece of bread. But it became the legend it is today with a base of fried shrimp.

14. Étoufée

It shares a lot of similar ingredients with gumbo and jambalaya, but the roux base really brings out the best in crawfish. And don’t worry about crawfish sometimes being called “mudbugs,” either — that’s just Southern for “delicious.”